Coolest jobs in tech: from the pits of Le Mans to the dugouts of Fenway Park

The geeks have entered the locker room.

Building anew

LiveStrong Sporting Park

Sporting Kansas City

While Conley brings a 100-year-old relic into the modern age, technical architect Scott Unruh of Sporting Kansas City spends his days at the one-year-old LiveStrong Sporting Park, an 18,500-seat stadium that is one of the most technologically advanced facilities in Major League Soccer.

Sporting has a distributed antenna system within the stadium and offers an open WiFi network powered by 180 access points. The stadium has its own video production studio, all the VIP suites come with iPads with a special app for controlling the TVs, and all 18,500 seats have QR codes that fans can scan to check in and earn points. Sporting also delivers customized video content on TVs throughout the building using the same Cisco StadiumVision technology seen at the ultramodern Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

All the players get iPads, and Unruh and his crew make sure they have video, analytics, and a playbook for the coming week’s game on their tablets. For fans, mobile apps offered by the team let attendees play trivia, get stats, and accrue points that can be redeemed for awards like player autographs.

Since maintaining the wireless network requires lots of in-stadium testing, Unruh often gets a chance to watch the games and get up close to the stage during concerts. “To light up a stadium we do a lot of testing during games," he says. "We'll sit within the crowd, sit right on the front line, field level, and do wireless surveying and analysis, which is nice. It's good to be able to sit and watch a game while you’re actually doing work.”

During concerts, he says, “I’ll stay back by the sound stage and do higher end diagnostics work, and the engineers go in with the cell phones as well and we match up the data. They'll fight their way to the front and gather readings as they’re going that way, so we’ve got good data points. We want to make sure the fans have wireless access even when they’re out in the very middle of the field and enjoying the concert.”

Unruh comes from an IT consulting background with experience in vulnerability testing, and he joined Sporting Kansas City in 2010 as construction on the new stadium was getting underway. He wasn’t previously a big soccer fan but got caught up in the excitement after he came on, particularly when the new stadium opened midway through last season and a late-season surge helped the team into the playoffs.

“It’s not your normal corporate IT world,” he says of his new job. “It’s a much different challenge. The cool thing about it is what we're doing with the technology and how we’re changing the experience within the stadium. I think anyone on my team would say its definitely their dream job and one they wouldn’t leave any time soon.”

The NFL, video, and trash talking

While Unruh keeps things smooth at a single stadium, Al Matthews of FanVision roams from one NFL stadium to the next. An IT project manager at the University of Pennsylvania during the week, Matthews has been an engineer for FanVision on weekends the past two football seasons.

Having grown up in Philadelphia, the Eagles fan is lucky enough to work at the team’s Lincoln Financial Field while also making trips to NFL stadiums in New York, Minnesota, St. Louis, and Washington, DC. “I feel like I’m a member of the Eagles team, the staff at the stadium,” Matthews says, because keeping the FanVision system running smoothly requires so much interaction with various tech teams. He’s also occasionally lucky enough to run into former Eagles players.

FanVision provides a handheld device, basically a small television set, that fans can buy or rent at stadiums to get extra camera feeds from the game they’re watching, along with coverage of other games happening throughout the country. Instead of relying on cellular or WiFi signals, FanVision essentially provides its own TV broadcast to fans within the stadium and to tailgaters in the parking lot.

Al Matthews, at FedEx Field in Washington, DC, confirms that FanVision is working.

Matthews has to coordinate with TV networks and radio stations to secure connections to camera and audio feeds, test signal strength throughout the stadium, provide IT support to the team that produces content for FanVision devices, and manage the software and hardware that FanVision uses at the stadium. While Matthews had to learn a lot about professional broadcasting to get the job done, his expertise in IT means he could be handling almost any task, even taking calls from other stadiums when things go wrong elsewhere.

“Right at kickoff is definitely a stressful time,” he says, but when thing settle down, you might see Matthews in front of his laptop with a FanVision device in his hand and headphones in his ears to check video and audio quality.

As an Eagles fan, he’s been able to cheer them on at home and on the road, and has suffered through both horrendous losses and great wins. He worked a playoff game in which Green Bay came to Philadelphia and beat the Eagles, along with a lopsided Eagles win in DC in 2010. Prior to that Eagles win, Redskins team staff “was chastising me," Matthews said, because the Redskins had traded for Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. The chastising quickly turned to silence as the Eagles took command.

Matthews tries to be polite, though—even that time last season when his Eagles beat St. Louis on the road. “I kind of have to shut my mouth when my team is playing some of the other teams,” he says.

Prior to his NFL gig, Matthews did some work as a concert technician. But it didn’t quite compare to professional sports. “I’ve always been one of those guys in the background but never at this level and not in the NFL,” he says.

Technology makes pro sports better—for fans and athletes

Tech pros like Houghton, Conley, Unruh, and Matthews don't end up on highlight reels, but they help make pro sports the modern, technology-driven spectacle it is today. Technology is changing the way sports are contested, giving athletes valuable analysis tools to improve performance and giving fans a more interactive experience at home and in stadiums.

As amazing as today's technology would seem to sports fans from the days Fenway Park was built, Conley notes the industry is advancing so quickly that it's hard to predict what things will look like even five years from now. By then, today's challenges—like perfecting wireless access throughout all stadiums—may be solved, and new problems we haven't dreamed up yet will be on the front burner. But that's the exciting part of the job.

“I love technology. I love gadgets,” Conley says. “I love figuring all these things out, these puzzles that come up. It would be neat to do it for a bank. But it’s cool to do it for sports.”